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Asahel Grant's Romanticized Nestorians

Dan Graves, MSL

When Asahel "Hakim" Grant rode into Lezan, the first of the Nestorian
mountain towns he visited, he did so with uncertainty. What hostility
would he face? To his relief, the people greeted him warmly, inspired to
friendship by a blind man whose sight he had restored some years before
through removing a cataract.

Grant had become a doctor and married at a young age, settling in
Pennsylvania. When his first wife died in 1831 after only four years of
marriage, he moved to New York where he built a large and lucrative
practice. He remarried. A missionary conference inspired him to step
forward to serve among the Nestorians.

The doctor supposed that this ancient Christian sect were descendants
of the ten "lost tribes" of Israel (Israelites exported by the Assyrians
in the 8th-century BC). He wrote a book about them with the lengthy
title The Nestorians; or, The lost tribes: containing evidence of
their identity; an account of their manners, customs, and ceremonies;
together with sketches of travel in ancient Assyria, Armenia, Media, and
Mesopotamia; and illustrations of Scripture prophecy. It was a
bestseller.

Before publication of his book, Grant's wife Judith died of an
unidentified fever. A woman who emanated Christian zeal and love, she
was adored by all who knew her. Some months later, Grant's twin
daughters, who had been in good health, died within weeks of each other
of unrelated contagions. Grant himself was seriously ill. In Mardin, he
was was house-bound for several days owing to weakness. Finally he felt
well enough to take some exercise. While he was riding outside the city,
a rioting mob attacked his residence, intending to kill him.

Grant loved the Nestorians. For them he put his life at risk from
mobs, bandits, cold, dysentery and near-drowning; for them he neglected
his own sons. Yet his strenuous efforts to open a mission among these
ferocious relics of Eastern Christianity magnified their threat in the
eyes of Muslims and helped bring about their destruction by a coalition
of Turks and Kurds. Grant had urged the Nestorians to make peace with
their enemies but they failed to do so; perhaps some of the blame falls
on him: invited to the negotiations, where his commonsense might have
made a difference, he refused. The Nestorians unwisely did not prepare
for the coming war, certain of their own invincibility; in fact, they
aggravated the situation with acts of provocation.

Called away from Asheetha, where the Nestorian patriarch resided, to
tend a painful boil on an enemy's neck, Grant cheated death again. While
he was gone (so sick that he could hardly stand, but nonetheless tending
patients) the Muslims and Kurds attacked. Grant escaped through
treacherous territory to Mosul where he labored for several months,
assisting Nestorian fugitives who poured out of the mountains.

The following year he contracted typhus from the refugees he was
tending. Feverish and wandering in mind, he died on
this day, April 24, 1844, aged just 36. He was buried the next
day; high dignitaries attended the funeral. All Mosul wept.

Bibliography:

"Grant, Asahel." National Cyclopedia of American Biography.
New York : J.T. White, 1930 -